Fly Burevestnik Fly!

Jeffrey Lewis 0:07

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, maybe, and nonproliferation. I am Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

Aaron Stein 0:20

I'm Dr. Ehrenstein, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. And remember, arms control and disarmament are no longer in style. We are back to the arms racing.

Jeffrey 0:29

Thus, the arms race podcast.

Aaron 0:32

Arms race and deterrence podcast?

Jeffrey 0:34

Arms race and deterrence podcast. I mean, look. Arms control is about being able to manage, is a tool for managing the risk that is at the heart of any deterrence balance. There will be arms control again. Not going to be any disarmament, but there are going to be arms control again.

Aaron 0:57

Yeah, it'll come back. It's like the JNCO jeans or the mom jeans. At some point, they all come back, right?

Jeffrey 1:02

Oh, my God. You like that? Oh, my God. Did you have JNCOs? No. I was – no. You were a little too old for JNCOs. I'm sorry if I just – Too old and not cool. I had JNCOs. Wow.

Aaron 1:14

I should have kept them in the closet. Oh, my God.

Jeffrey 1:17

Now he's back. Oh, my God. Yeah. Okay, well, what's your segue, genius?

Aaron 1:23

I don't know. Well, okay. I mean, I'm too literal. Floppy, wide leg, launcher, arctic. You know, I'm struggling for things up there. Oh, no, via assembly. What was once old is back again?

Jeffrey 1:38

I don't know, man. Yeah. No, that was bad. So we're going to talk about Burevestnik.

Aaron 1:44

Yeah, Skyfall.

Jeffrey 1:46

Because there's been a lot of open source reporting, which is, I would like to say me because I get credit for it, but it's actually the Slack channel. Okay. Yeah.

Aaron 1:58

$3 if you're a student, $5 if you're not.

Jeffrey 2:00

Yep. That noticed that Russia was gearing up again to conduct a Burevestnik test, the nuclear-powered cruise missile. And I feel like listeners kind of know what this thing is, but I feel like every time Russia does one of these tests, I have to re-explain to people what a nuclear-powered cruise missile is.

Aaron 2:21

I was actually going to prompt you to say, like, there are people who maybe are just stumbling across this who have never heard of Burevestnik or Skyfall.

Jeffrey 2:27

Right. And the fact that Russia is testing a new strategic system got more play than usual because the test preparations were continuing, even though Putin was meeting with Trump in Alaska. And I do feel a little guilty about this, Aaron. I am interested in it because I'm an OSINT person and I care about the truth and facts.

And it's like, this is a true thing that is happening, but it did get amplified because it fed into the spray tan Caligula content machine, right? Where people are like, ah, Trump's such a fool. I, you know, Trump, Trump is a fool, but he, This is not an example of that. I mean, we could talk about Alaska and all our complaints, but I understand what drew the eyeballs.

But these two things are not so closely related, I think.

Aaron 3:30

Well, I don't think they're related at all. But you know what really got me about Alaska?

Jeffrey 3:37

I like the B2 overflight. But anyway, what got you?

Aaron 3:40

I love that. I know. And I got people yelling at me on Twitter like I'm some kind of Trumpkin.

Jeffrey 3:44

But Richard Holbrook did it. Richard Holbrook made Slobodan Milosevic have dinner under the wing of a B2. Like, you know, you keep line stepping.

Aaron 3:57

I nearly just choked on my laugh. I just wonder what the security prep for that was like. Hey, Boris, when Putin steps off the plane, he's going to get buzzed by the American nuclear bomber tasked with defeating your air defenses. But don't worry, it's unarmed. It's all for the photos because Trump likes you to walk through this thing.

I mean, that must have been the hell of a thing.

Jeffrey 4:19

I also like that you can be like, what? It was a flyover in honor of President Putin. You know, which some people took it that way. Like, oh, it's a great honor for Putin to see our beautiful, you know, and it's like, ah, okay.

Aaron 4:35

I mean, well, I think Trump does the B-2 flyover everywhere he goes now because he wants to just show off that he used the B-2. And so it has nothing to do with Putin at all.

Jeffrey 4:44

I mean, it's a nice airplane.

Aaron 4:49

It's very cool. But what really gets me about these summits now is Putin's face.

Jeffrey 4:55

Yeah.

Aaron 4:55

That man has been pulled more than a Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Jeffrey 4:59

I know.

Aaron 5:00

I mean, he's getting the MAGA makeover. He looks like he should be dating Kimberly Gullfile and on Fox News or Newsmax as a presenter. He's just like this. I'm watching this thing. I know. Go Google what he looked like when he was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.

Jeffrey 5:16

I did.

Aaron 5:17

I did because I think it's fascinating to me that this is like an aesthetic now.

Jeffrey 5:24

Yeah. You know, like, I don't know if you ever saw and we don't need to go down this rabbit hole too much because, you know, the the MAGA makeover is like a whole other like cultural podcast. But it's that scene in Brazil where the person's face is being stretched. Oh, well, anyway, I just yeah, man, we live in a weird time.

And I think what I would say is a serious point is. The look on Putin's stretched face showed that the B2 overflight made an impression. It didn't, I think, result in any tangible outcomes, but I just thought it was nice to do. But I think all of this is of a piece, whether it's the bad plastic surgery.

Like, these people look at the world in a certain way, and I don't begrudge the staff for being smart about that.

Aaron 6:20

Well... Okay. But... So, I'm trying to come up with how to translate bad plastic surgery into... You are still going for the... You're still going... The open-air nuclear reactor spewing shit out the back as it ostensibly flies. I guess it's just putting feces behind you and not worrying about the wreckage that you made in your wick. Right.

So, explain what a nuclear power cruise missile is.

Jeffrey 6:49

Yeah, I'm... I mean, I've been like struggling.

Aaron 6:53

Like, OK, first of all, we have never really seen this thing.

Jeffrey 6:55

You know, they showed us a brief video of it flying from another aircraft film from another aircraft. It's pretty blurry and you can't really make out anything. We saw some of the airframes in a factory once, but we didn't see the nuclear propulsion unit. Putin has said it's nuclear powered. We know how the U.S. went about doing this.

We know everything. Based on where they're testing it, that it's pretty radioactive. We know when they tried to pull one up off the bottom of the ocean after letting it cool for a couple of years, something went wrong and there was an explosion and it killed a bunch of people. So we don't really know a lot, but we think that in the same way that a jet engine burns fuel to combust air, to compress it and blow it out the back, you can use the heat from a nuclear reactor to do that.

So it's an open nuclear reactor. It's not a big one. Right. But it is an open nuclear reactor. And the advantage of this, and some egg arguing with me on Twitter, you know, who was like, I was pointing out this was a way to defeat missile defenses. And the person's like, missile defenses are exoatmospheric. This is endoatmospheric.

And it's like, yeah, that's right. It's endoatmospheric where the missile defenses don't work. And then I was like, that's the whole point of having an intercontinental range capable endo-atmospheric platform. It's the same reason that they have an intercontinental range underwater platform. Missile defenses also don't swim. And then he was like, well, is it really intercontinental? Like, that's the whole f***ing point.

Aaron 8:41

That is the whole damn point of this thing.

Jeffrey 8:43

It will fly as long as the reactor works and the airframe doesn't fall apart. That's right.

Aaron 8:48

And so theoretically, it can go a very, very long ways.

Jeffrey 8:53

They could do figure eights over Antarctica.

Aaron 8:56

Forever. Yeah. In theory, right? It's just sort of airframe fatigue. I presume you wouldn't do that, but you know. One never knows, man. I wouldn't pull my face that way, but some people make decisions. I don't know, man. You wouldn't leave your spouse for Laura Loomer? No. Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Jeffrey 9:21

The whole fact that Guilfoyle has become a Trump after having been a Newsom

Aaron 9:27

That's why I lived in San Francisco. She was the first sort of lady.

Jeffrey 9:30

I know, I know, I know. And, you know, Newsom is positioning himself as the anti-Trump. Like, man, the kids are going to be, that's going to be a trivia question like 30 years, right?

Aaron 9:39

If we're still around, yeah. So explain how we figured out the test. Because while you may have not been the first person to get this one, I think you were the first person to sort of put markers around Burevestnik I think it's when it exploded like half a year, half a decade ago.

Jeffrey 9:58

When, when, when Putin did his little dog and pony show, we geolocated the site. And I would like to say that we were the first people to geolocate the site. We were not, we were the second, some rando on Twitter. Rando sounds insulting. This person did a great job. They also geolocated it. We did it independently of them.

And like, we were all done. And then we were like, God damn it. Somebody beat us to it. So we, we, but like, I think we're the first, I don't know, people that the media would listen to, but I don't want to Bigfoot. I just don't remember the person's name, you know, it was kind of a one-off.

But I don't want to steal credit. But then, yes, I think we were the first people who, when they were lifting, when there was the explosion, like we were able to look at an AIS of the ship and it was the, I think it was the Sarah Brianka. So we could tell it was a recovery effort. We could see the barge in an image from Planet.

We could see the barge damaged in another, a different later image. So we were the first people to put that all together. But, you know, we've been hugely helped because on the Slack channel, we have a user who wants to remain anonymous. So like I... I don't want to steal this person's work who is obsessed with this site.

And this person looks at low resolution satellite image or moderate resolution. So they look at a lot of Sentinel data and they look at a lot of AIS data. And then they just sort of alert the Slack channel every time you see the configuration of ships that looks like it's associated with the test. And then I, you know, email Anne.

And I'm like, hey, Anne. Can we get a sky sad of Nevaeh's Emilia? And like, lo and behold, you can see all the shipping containers show up, cranes, helicopters, all the activity. And it just, you know, it becomes clear that they're getting ready for a test.

Aaron 11:49

And for some reason, the container is blue. Are they typically blue when the Russians test this thing or am I making that up?

Jeffrey 11:55

I mean, I think, you know, containers are just often blue and they have a few red ones and a few white ones. But yeah, they seem to be really big on the blue containers. Oh, the other thing is we can see the planes associated with Ross Adam and we can see missile telemetry, missile telemetry planes.

Aaron 12:12

Then typically the U.S. sends a plane up there as well.

Jeffrey 12:14

And you can see the U.S. out sniffing. So it's like, what do you think is happening? Right.

Aaron 12:22

Does it work? No.

Jeffrey 12:24

You know, some time ago, Decker found a site which he said, and I believe, looks like it's a deployment site for Burr-Vasnik. I think the question of does it work? I mean, I don't know, man. Like, what do you think? Like, I don't know that it has to work.

Aaron 12:47

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 12:48

You know, like this is a weird prestige project. I think in 100 years, 50 years, we'll know. I mean, I won't know. I'll be dead. But, you know, grad students will finally learn like, oh, well, this was the pet project of so-and-so who, you know, like I don't I don't know where this thing came from. So my guess is they tell Putin it works.

Aaron 13:13

Yeah.

Jeffrey 13:13

Or they tell Putin it will shortly work. I think shore may work.

Aaron 13:18

I'm making that up. Yeah. And I do think, I wasn't being flippant, that the overlap with the Alaska summit and the preparations for the tests were actually coincidental. It was a left-hand, right-hand thing. I don't think that they were preparing the test in a way to signal to the U.S. that there was something going on.

Jeffrey 13:38

No, because they test a lot.

Aaron 13:41

Right, exactly. And so this isn't... Like out of the norm. These things were probably scheduled long in advance.

Jeffrey 13:47

As soon as the ice cleared in the Valles Emilia, we saw all the containers go in. So they didn't – and that was in the – that was like a month ago. It was in June because it's fucking cold up there and the ice doesn't clear until like June. So that was – they had planned this all year long.

And I think what I think is really important is Just like they didn't stop their offensive in Ukraine, they didn't stop their plan tests. They didn't stop.

Aaron 14:20

Why would they?

Jeffrey 14:21

Yeah, right. They just, they're continuing on. And if Trump wants to talk, they'll talk. And I think it's good that they talked. I mean, obviously I would have, I did, you know, support a different candidate for president of the United States. So, you know, I, I think I would wish someone else were doing the talking, but I don't, you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with talking.

And I think it would be insane to demand, you know, as a condition of talking to the Russians that they, you know, stop their offensive and don't test any new systems and, you know, let all the people that, you know, they've arrested wrongly out of jail, like, you know.

Aaron 15:02

Well, I mean – so I completely agree. I didn't have any – I guess I'm pushing the summit. I didn't really care that it was in Alaska. I don't really care that they used to be, I guess, Russian Orthodox and there are some old Russian Orthodox churches. I'm confident enough that it's a nation that they're not getting it back.

I don't know. Call me crazy. I don't think they're coming across the straight there. I don't think there's actually any problems with the two leaders talking. Yeah. And so the question I was going to ask, and I guess I'm curious about, is we were joking in the earlier that arms control eventually will come back. Can arms control come back in the Twitter era where everybody has an opinion and everything gets sort of amplified?

Jeffrey 15:45

Oh, yeah. I mean, look. We tried with the JCPOA. That was the early Twitter era. But the JCPOA had Obama on it. That's true. Right? I mean, if Trump – I mean, look. Trump just announced that he obliterated Iran's nuclear program.

Aaron 16:02

Yes. Well, we've moved on. That was like five news cycles ago.

Jeffrey 16:05

And he, as a political fact, he obliterated it.

Aaron 16:12

I mean, it's still there.

Jeffrey 16:14

You know, like I was like, look at it. You know, like I think one of the tunnels in Isfahan is open. I see like vehicles and like I saw a truck crane there the other day. And like, like the program still exists. Right. But politically it is obliterated.

Aaron 16:27

What's obliterated off the front pages?

Jeffrey 16:29

That's what I mean. Right? Like, what does obliterated mean? Like, okay, we all assumed obliterated meant physically destroyed. But what it actually means is, you know, it's fallen down some, you know, brain rot hole for the Magikrit. It's gone. Problem solved. Done. You know, and I, like, Give the Iranians credit. The Iranians are like, oh, we'll invite the IAEA back in to inspect our obliterated program.

Yep, it's obliterated. No, it is terribly obliterated. Please don't obliterate it again.

Aaron 17:09

You know?

Jeffrey 17:11

So I think if Trump were to sign an agreement... A sort type agreement.

Aaron 17:17

I've always thought sort is the way forward. Just gold-plated sort.

Jeffrey 17:22

So I think... I mean, what I think gets interesting is... Putin does care about the terms and Trump does not. Yes. And so what I think Putin wants is some kind of restriction on U.S. missile defenses or no serious restrictions on offensive forces so that they can build systems that will penetrate.

Aaron 17:56

Which is Bervesnik.

Jeffrey 17:58

Bervesnik. Status 6, the stupid underwater torpedo. The, you know, SS-18 follow-on that's going to fly over the South Pole. Avant-garde, which is good for stability. Unpopular opinion. Well, maybe good. It's why they're going to put a nuclear weapon in orbit. Like all that stuff, right? Yeah.

Aaron 18:25

So setting up the future of our joint sort of research agenda for next year.

Jeffrey 18:28

Right. So. But like this is like, you know, exactly like Reagan, Gorby, but dumber. It's going to come down to, you know. Will Trump give at all on Golden Dome? And if he doesn't, then I think Putin is going to be like, well, fine, but I'm not going to give on all the ways in which I plan to defeat Golden Dome.

And then, you know, we're going to have, you know, some stupid sort like agreement. Which for listeners, sort is the Moscow Treaty. It's the Bush era treaty that had no verification. It was basically a...

Aaron 19:15

It was a handshake.

Jeffrey 19:17

Linton Brooks called it two nuclear postures stapled together. He described the treaty as two postures stapled together. Yeah.

Aaron 19:31

It was just sort of, we have this, you have that. We're just going to kind of agree that we both have what we have and we're going to keep it more or less where we got it.

Jeffrey 19:37

Linton Brooks is a national treasure. I just, I love that man so much. So they might do that. And in which case, you know, it doesn't really I mean, it's better than nothing, but it probably doesn't help us. You know, the way I think for listeners, I gave a talk about this. The way I think about these problems is.

Nuclear deterrence is about managing risk, and we actually don't want that risk to be zero. I mean, you can't make that risk zero as long as nuclear weapons exist, which is why over the really long term, it may not be such a great idea. But in the short term, there is an irreducible risk. And what you are trying to do is figure out what that acceptable risk is so that you can get other foreign policy benefits, like deterring someone from invading you or forcing someone to do what you want.

And like arms control is like, I think of that as a tool for helping set that risk profile. Because like, we don't want to We don't want too high of a risk of an accidental war. No, but we want like some little risk of an accidental nuclear war. Right. The threat that leaves something to chance.

Aaron 20:50

That's right.

Jeffrey 20:51

Yeah. So anyway, I, I think, you know, eventually if this isn't just about theatrics, if this is about like setting risk levels And maybe controlling expenditures at some point, like we are, we, there will be an outcome where we will try to imagine some new universe. We're not going to like it very much. Cause I think numbers will be a lot bigger.

Systems will be a lot more complex. But yeah, there may be some things that we were like, okay, well we won't do that. Or we'll only do a little of that. I guess.

Aaron 21:24

I mean, that's the SS 18 follow up.

Jeffrey 21:30

Yeah. Well, yeah, maybe.

Aaron 21:32

And that's what it is. If you want to go the other way around the Earth, it's kind of a partial orbit. That's what it is. There is no fractional orbit.

Jeffrey 21:41

It is like being pregnant. You're either in orbit or you are not in orbit. It's a physical condition. Bob McNamara. Full of bullshit. I know, I know, I know. They didn't want, sorry, for listeners, when the Soviets tested an orbital bombardment system, which is a violation of the Outer Space Treaty, the Johnson administration did not want to make an issue of it.

And so they said, well, it's a fractional orbital bombardment system. So it doesn't actually violate the treaty because it only does a fraction of an orbit. That is a You are either in orbit or you are not. It does not matter if it is a fraction or not. It takes energy to come back down.

Aaron 22:23

He's self-deterred. What can you say?

Jeffrey 22:25

I mean, I understand why they were trying to get strategic missile talks with the Soviets going. So, like, sure, they don't want to make a thing of it. But, like, Bob McNamara was lying. I'm off the rails. I'm off the rails.

Aaron 22:43

You're on the rails. This podcast started with JNCO James, and they're on Bob McNamara and the End of Space Treaty. But that's good. Burraveshnik. So Decker really found a deployment site? I mean, he found...

Jeffrey 22:55

Okay, so what we found, what he found, and I pushed him in this direction, there is a... Old disused nuclear weapons storage site that suddenly got a huge amount of construction around it. And the construction, in addition to sort of refurbing, rehabbing the nuclear weapons deployment site, the construction looked like a missile base. You know, barracks, housing, administrative offices, and launch revetments.

So the question is, why would you co-locate these things? Like, it's not a silo. It doesn't look like a mobile missile base. And the answer, I think, is the nuclear propulsion units need to be kept securely and safely.

Aaron 23:52

And so they're fitted into the missile body as you're thinking about it? Well, I don't know.

Jeffrey 23:57

I don't know if they're fitted into the missile body. I don't know if the factory installs them and then they're in a canister and then they're in a bunker or if they're stored separately from the missile body. I just don't know enough about the... Yeah, the propulsion system. The propulsion system to know what the deployment – but the point – I guess the point is there's no reason – like this is like a one-off deployment site.

I've never seen anything like it before. It clearly is a missile launch site because of the revetments, and there's no reason you would co-locate it at a nuclear weapon storage site, certainly not a disused one. Except maybe you wanted to use those bunkers and repurpose them. So we inferred, you know, Decker basically was like, what do you think this is?

And he thought the same thing, but he was not confident. And I was like, I mean, you know, I might not be right, but I understand what the simplest explanation for all this is. That would be a Bervestnik deployment site. And he was like, yeah, I think so too. But I don't know. I mean, you know.

Aaron 25:06

Yeah. I mean, this is a big waste of money for the Russians, if you ask me.

Jeffrey 25:11

Well, I mean, so is Sentinel?

Aaron 25:15

Oh, yeah. No, no, totally. I know. I understand that sometimes when you got money, or at least When you have – I was about to say – because we don't actually have money. We're a deficit nation and so are they. But when you have money to spend, you have to spend it someplace. So you get bureaucratic interest within it and renewing the missile sort of elements of your nuclear deterrent.

Jeffrey 25:36

Do you know about Halperin reallocations? I do. I heard it from Mort. Mort told me the version of it. So Mort Halperin, for listeners, told me this story, but then had me read the article. And the article is good, but it is much more professional than Mort being funny about it. But Mort's idea is the reality of the defense budget is there is a tiny percentage that is useful.

And there's a tiny percentage that is genuinely dangerous because it fuels the arms race. But the vast majority of it is just merely wasteful. And what he doesn't say in the article, but what he said to me is he's like, our job is to convert the truly dangerous to the merely wasteful. Yeah. And I like he's being funny and it's like a slight exaggeration.

But then you saw that the Trump administration reprogrammed money out of Sentinel and into the new Air Force One. I'm like, OK, that is the weirdest helper and allocation ever.

Aaron 26:47

When I saw that, I just started dying laughing. You know what I mean? Because somebody in the Pentagon had to go find money for that airplane because they hadn't planned for the airplane. Because they had planned for the two 747s, whatever we call them in sort of DOD speak, to come on and get retrofitted to be Air Force One.

Everything you got to do to make Air Force One. And then the airplane just fucking fell in their lap. And they're like, you got to fix it. So there's somebody in there, an auditor, a comptroller, somebody who's probably good at their job. And there's all these rules that we have no idea. That's right. There's rules. There's rules about how you can allocate money.

And then they're like, you got to convert. Well, there's a bunch of money over here. It's in the Air Force budget and there's a nuclear thing to it. So we can do.

Jeffrey 27:34

I mean, I will say Sam Lair and I have been kicking this around and now we are well and truly off the rails and we should go back to Burr of Esnick. But, you know, it is not clear to me that we... And maybe this is really the lesson of Burr of Esnick and all the other stuff.

Like, I truly think all of this, the root of all of this is the Bush administration's decision in 2003 to leave the ABM tree.

Aaron 27:58

Yeah, totally.

Jeffrey 27:59

That's it. And that has created the environment... In which the Russians and the Chinese are seeking new strategic programs. And this is like accelerated by the fact that, you know, the democratic transitions in those countries failed. So they are like adversarial to us and they're hostile to us and they're very focused on their defense industries. But now you have this like interactive thing going And I think one of the best arguments against Sentinel, which Borovetsnik helps illustrate, is we're in this dynamic period where we kind of don't know what the Russian and the Chinese force structure is going to look like in 10 years.

And weirdly, locking ourselves into a particular force structure might not be optimal. And like, I don't think we need ICBMs. I don't either. But if we do build ICBMs, it's not clear to me that silos in the Great Plains are the optimal ICBM deployment mode for lots of reasons. Now, politically- Barca. Barca. Sorry. What if we did it in Australia?

Aaron 29:11

Yeah, there you go.

Jeffrey 29:11

I love that.

Aaron 29:12

Anyway- That's a new start going away. That's fine. Oh, we could.

Jeffrey 29:15

That's right. But- Politically, that won't happen because there's a Senate ICBM caucus, and I know that. But I actually don't know that Pausing Sentinel, what was the phrase? Until we know what the hell is going on might not be the worst idea because I really do wonder if sinking now the vast sum of money that is necessary to modernize the command and control infrastructure and the silos is really the best way to go about doing this.

Aaron 29:52

I mean, that's a whole other podcast.

Jeffrey 29:53

I know it's a whole other, but I'm saying like Brevesnik helps illustrate that, right? Which is they have a, they, the Russians have a ton of new programs under development to defeat missile defenses. The Chinese have a ton of new programs under development to defeat missile defenses. We have a ton of new missile defenses under development. Like, are they going to build missile defenses that we're going to have to defeat?

Because if they are, then, you know, we probably need to sit down and have like, you know, a serious think about what a nuclear force looks like that in that environment. So like maybe maybe taking a year on Sentinel to figure out what the hell is going on. Not that they're going to use that time, but, you know, wouldn't have necessarily been the worst thing.

By the way, that fucking environmental shelter is on rails. So that's it. We're off the rails, but the environmental shelter at Pankovo is still on the rails.

Aaron 30:43

I was about to say, this whole podcast was a little off the rails.

Jeffrey 30:47

Because we haven't done a podcast in so long, Aaron.

Aaron 30:49

Yeah, we were just riffing, but that's okay. Patreon.com slash ACW podcast where there's not a better plug than you can find Burrow Vesnik in real time. $3 if you're a student, $5 if you're not. You can even beat the great Jeffrey Lewis to do that. And so you'll know what podcast is coming before it even comes out.

$3 if you're a student, $5 if you're not. Patreon.com slash ACW podcast. Let's talk about force structure, because I agree with that. We've got to rethink how we build nuclear weapons, because this is now the arms racing and deterrence podcast. It should be like a project we do together. You know, one of us may have put some shit in on that for both of us, but we'll see.

All right, I'll talk to you guys later. I'll talk to you, Jeffrey, and then I have to pick up my kids.